Kenyan-born Maathai was a global leader on environmental and anti-poverty issues. She earned a master's degree in biology from the University of Pittsburgh and received the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder and remarkable hitter, he helped the team win two World Series. A Puerto Rico native, Clemente was the first Latino in U.S. baseball to receive Most Valuable Player and World Series MVP awards and to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Andy Warhol led the pop-art movement beginning in the 1960s, blurring the lines between art and life, commerce, film and celebrity. "The pop idea was that anybody could do anything." Pittsburgh, his birthplace, is home to the Andy Warhol Museum, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and a collaborative project between the Carnegie Institute, the Dia Art Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Originally built in 1911 as a distribution center for products sold to mills and mines, the Warhol Museum was designed by architect Richard Gluckman and features seven floors of gallery and exhibition space. It opened in May 1994.

An American entrepreneur and engineer, George Westinghouse is the inventor of the railway air brake. This device enabled trains to be stopped – for the first time – with fail-safe accuracy by locomotive engineers and was eventually adopted on the majority of the world's railroads. Westinghouse was also a pioneer of the electrical industry and one of Thomas Edison’s main rivals. A transplant to the Pittsburgh region from his native New York state, Westinghouse and his wife, made their first home in Pittsburgh in 1868.

A Guatemala native, Von Ahn is a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor and MacArthur "Genius" grant winner who pioneered the notion of crowd-sourcing and the software reCAPTCHA, which is used to digitize books and other printed text while protecting websites from "bots." Von Ahn's innovation was acquired by Google in 2009.

Marine biologist, conservationist and author. Her book, Silent Spring, brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented share of the American people and is credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it urged a reversal in national pesticide policy, leading to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., by Jimmy Carter in 1980.

American businesswoman, philanthropist and widow of former U.S. Senator H. John Heinz and wife of U.S. Senator John Kerry. She is Chair of The Heinz Endowments and Heinz Family Philanthropies, which are widely known for helping the Pittsburgh region thrive economically, ecologically, educationally and culturally.

This University of Pittsburgh researcher and professor developed the first vaccine for polio – a viral disease that can result in partial or full paralysis and one of America's most frightening public health crises – on March 26, 1953 in Pittsburgh. Widespread use of the vaccine is expected to lead to global eradication of this once dreaded disease.

Called "the father of modern transplantation," Starzl is a physician, researcher and organ transplant expert. He performed the first human liver transplants and has made a home in Pittsburgh since 1981. In 2012, Starzl was named a recipient of the Lasker Award, one of the world's most prestigious medical sciences prizes for his pioneering work in the field of liver transplantation. Dr. Jonas Salk was also a Lasker Award recipient.

A Pittsburgh native who grew up in the city’s Hill District, August Wilson was a prolific playwright who chronicled African American life. His most celebrated achievement is a 10-play cycle known as the Pittsburgh Cycle, wherein each of the plays is set in a different decade of the 20th century. All the plays, except for one, are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District neighborhood. He was the first African American to have two playing running simultaneoulsy on Broadway and is one of seven American playwrights to win two Pulitzer Prizes. August Wilson died in 2005.